Album Review: Burnt Up on Re-Entry by Boduf Songs

The dead air surrounding the shreds of melody and Mat Sweet's voice on Boduf Songs' early albums felt like it contained the weight of the world. However, on Burnt Up on Re-Entry, he's concerned with a different kind of space. As on his brilliant 2010 album This Alone Above All Else in Spite of Everything, Sweet adds more accompaniment to his compelling whispers, incorporating searing guitars and chittering electronics that suggest he's singing from a spacecraft, far from any other living beings.

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Boduf Songs used to be the work of one man, a guitar, and acres of chilly blank space. Mat Sweet whispered his vocals and the songs were devotionally paced, but in their unremitting, medieval bleakness, there was a hint of metal: If Phil Elverum's love of black metal were more palpable in his Mount Eerie records, they might sound more like Sweet's work as Boduf Songs. Not coincidentally, Sweet has worked in harder, noisier climates: His crawling doom metal work in Map of Hell or his Mogwai-reminiscent post-rock outfit Four Man Ghost, both on his own label Blue Baby Recordings, testify to a lifelong membership to that society.

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Taking an intergalactic trawl through apocalyptic themes, Mat Sweet's new album as Boduf Songs is by turns threatening, languid and fiercely hallucinatory, and often imbued with a futurist edge. For where his previous work as Boduf Songs (four LPs released on previous label Kranky) was largely acoustic, 'Burnt Up On Re-Entry' is a multi textured LP that cranks up driving guitar noise and harsh granular electronics alongside his tested barebones voice and guitar work. The resultant work is highly effective; a sick cavernous terror evoked with the newfound production chops.

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Mat Sweet’s last full-length as Boduf Songs, 2010?s This Alone Above All Else In Spite of Everything, was a defining work in his canon. Having spent three albums for Kranky feeling out his sound and developing as a songwriter, This Alone… felt like the culmination of the experiment thus far. It was a dark and difficult masterpiece. In the wake of creating his most accomplished album to date, and his signing for Southern Records, Sweet has taken the opportunity to draw a line under the previous stage of his career, and Burnt Up On Re-Entry marks the beginning of a new phase of development.

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